California Supreme Court Denies Re-Hearing of Man Convicted of Killing a South Gate Boy

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LOS ANGELES (CNS) - On Wednesday, the California Supreme Court denied a re-hearing for a death row inmate who was convicted of murdering three boys in Los Angeles County in the 1970s.

The denial comes about two months after the state's highest court unanimously rejected the latest appeal filed by attorneys for Harold Ray Memro, who legally changed his name to Reno while on death row in December 1994.

Memro was convicted of first-degree murder for the July 1976 slaying of 10 year-old Ralph Chavez Jr. and the October 1978 death of 7-year-old Carl Carter Jr., and of second-degree murder for the July 1976 killing of 12-year- old Scott Fowler.

His initial conviction for the murders was overturned by the California Supreme Court and he was retried and again sentenced to death in 1987. The boys were discovered dead -- their throats slit -- near a pond in John Anson Ford Park in Bell Gardens on July 26, 1976. The boys had been fishing at the park.

Memro told police that he had gone to the park to take pictures of young boys and admitted slitting the boys' throats, according to a 1995 California Supreme Court ruling.

He also told police that he choked the 7-year-old -- who was the son of a family friend -- after the youth asked to leave Memro's apartment, where he had hoped to take nude photos of the youngster, according to the 1995 ruling.

The youngest victim, who lived in South Gate, was reported missing on Oct. 22, 1978, and his body was found five days later. Memro claimed that his confession involving the 1976 killings was coerced by South Gate police.

In the California Supreme Court's Aug. 30 ruling, Associate Justice Kathryn M. Werdegar wrote that there was ``strong, even overwhelming evidence he was guilty of killing three boys, that he forcibly sodomized one victim (possibly after he was dead) and that he represented a continuing threat to the safety of children in the neighborhood (inferable from the discovery by police that petitioner possessed hundreds of photographs of young children).''

From City News Service

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